Tucker Carlson's WWII interview fractures conservatives

You think you know the history of World War II: The Nazis were the bad guys and Adolf Hitler was probably the greatest villain the world has ever known — the author of a Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews. End of story, right? Tucker Carlson isn't so sure.

The former Fox News host sparked a right-wing "media meltdown" after interviewing a Holocaust-denying podcaster on his new online platform, Axios said. Carlson called Darryl Cooper "the best and most honest popular historian" in America. Cooper in turn called Winston Churchill the "chief villain of the Second World War," said CNN. Cooper also suggested that the Holocaust was an inadvertent consequence of poor German war planning, in which "millions of people ended up dead." 

That false history prompted a backlash from the White House and Jewish groups. Elon Musk deleted an X post promoting the interview. And the controversy forced a "rare moment of introspection" among conservative media figures, Axios said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump must "disavow" Carlson, conservative commentator William Galston said at The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump Jr. and J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee, are both scheduled to join Carlson on tour later this month. That can't happen. Trump must "draw a bright line between what's acceptable and what isn't, Galston added." What isn't: "Blatant antisemitism."

'Whackadoo revisionism'

Tucker Carlson's journey into "whackadoo revisionism" has made a dent in his "last cadre of conservative defenders," said another conservative writer, Ben Domenech, at The Spectator. The question: "Why is Tucker doing this?" Carlson's motives are "unknown" but it's clear he's gone from his longtime practice of "skirting the edge of acceptable discourse" to "jumping over the edge." And it's in keeping with the view Carlson has espoused since his career as the "most influential media figure on the right" was cut short after being fired by Fox last year: "America, rather than being the greatest nation in the history of the world, is at home and abroad a force for evil," Domenech said.

"Dubious charges of Nazism are a dime a dozen in U.S. political rhetoric," Sohrab Ahmari said at The Free Press.  But there is no other way to describe Cooper's ideas, nor Carlson's promotion of them. The "obvious fact" is that the Nazis were evil — and that Cooper's casting of Churchill as the war's villain is a "perverse moral inversion." 

'We believe in free speech'

"Is Vance still going to hang out with Tucker Carlson, even now?" the conservative Jim Geraghty said at The Washington Post. Carlson has caused headaches for Vance before: The nominee's infamous "childless cat ladies" comment came on Carlson's Fox News show in 2021. The latest controversy is worse. An "ordinary campaign" would avoid sending its vice presidential candidate to hang out publicly with a "Putin-adoring nutjob conspiracy theorist" ahead of the election, but Trump and Vance aren't running an ordinary campaign. "Let's see whether Vance finally draws the line at hanging with the guy who hosts a revisionist historian with a blind spot for Adolf Hitler," Geraghty said.

It does not look like Vance will skip out on Carlson, said The New York Times. "We believe in free speech and debate," Vance said during a campaign stop. The campaign later issued a statement declaring that Vance "obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson" but that he also "doesn't believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture." Vance is scheduled to appear onstage with Carlson on September 21.